Those who think New Jersey is nothing more than a toxic wasteland, get over it. Harry C. Dorer’s photographs offer proof that New Jersey offers so much more than ‘What exit?’
By: Anthony Stoeckert
Harry C. Dorer was just doing his job. A roll- up-your-sleeves, old-time newspaper man who took pictures for Newark newspapers for more than 40 years, Mr. Dorer amassed a life’s work that captured the people and places of New Jersey from the 1920s to the 1960s.
A sample of those images are collected in the book This Was New Jersey (Rutgers University Press, $29.95). Edited by John T. Cunningham, who worked with Mr. Dorer as a reporter on the Newark Sunday News, the book is filled with hundreds of pictures covering all areas of New Jersey from the 1920s up until the start of World War II. The book (comprised of pictures Mr. Dorer shot when he worked for the Newark Sunday Call) is an off-shoot of an exhibit of Mr. Dorer’s pictures the Newark Public Library hosted in 2005 and 2006.
With images of everything from marshlands and rural areas throughout the state to the city of Newark lit up for Christmas, the book captures New Jersey’s diversity. It’s a fitting tribute to Mr. Dorer, who loved New Jersey and educating people about the state.
"I think each of us (reporters) became amazed at him as we went out on trips because he knew New Jersey probably better than anyone had up until that point," says Mr. Cunningham, a self-described journalist-historian who has been writing about New Jersey for more than 50 years.
Mr. Dorer’s love of the Garden State made him a "chauvinist" when it came to non-Jersey assignments. In the book’s introduction, Mr. Cunningham shares a story about Mr. Dorer’s disgruntlement over an assignment in the Poconos and Catskill mountains. The shutterbug eventually gave in, but wasn’t happy about it.
"Even as he did it he was bitter, grumbling all day long," Mr. Cunningham says fondly.
Mr. Dorer’s ingenuity is evident throughout the book. The cover shot shows him climbing a girder in order to get in the right position for a picture.
The image of a couple’s silhouette as they share a kiss behind the sail of an iceboat on a frozen lake in northern New Jersey suggests Mr. Dorer was something of a romantic. He had an approach that Mr. Cunningham says was different from other photojournalists of the era.
"I think normally his contemporaries, if they were assigned to the Pine Barrens, for example, would go in and just snap a few shots, perhaps even without people," he says.
The Pine Barrens area was one of Mr. Dorer’s favorite places to photograph. A chapter of the book includes photos that show a sea of thin trees along a sandy road, a cranberry bog and, most interestingly, the people who lived in the Barrens. Called "Pineys," the residents were perceived as secretive, even dangerous by outsiders. Mr. Dorer knew otherwise and his photos show children picking berries, a family posing next to their old Ford, and Caleb Bennett, a 76-year-old man who lived in a woodland shack. Mr. Dorer had to pay Mr. Bennett in cigars in order to get him to pose.
One of Mr. Cunningham’s favorite photos in this chapter shows four children who, based on their beat-up clothes, are obviously of limited means. Two of the boys in the picture aren’t wearing shoes.
For much different reasons, Mr. Cunningham was also struck by pictures of the Ku Klux Klan Mr. Dorer took in 1922. Text accompanying the photos explains that the Klan had about 60,000 members throughout New Jersey. The pictures show members attending a funeral and, most shocking for Mr. Cunningham, a hooded Klansman standing at the pulpit of a church in Newark.
"The thought of any church permitting a bigot of that stature to occupy a pulpit, to me, is chilling," Mr. Cunningham says.
Much more whimsical and smile-inducing are a group of autographed pictures that would make any collector green with envy. After photographing a famous person who lived in, or visited, New Jersey, Mr. Dorer would send two enlargements to the subject, asking if he or she wouldn’t mind autographing one and returning it.
Among those who obliged with the request are three presidents (Warren Harding, Herbert Hoover and Franklin Roosevelt), opera star Anna Case, legendary entertainer Will Rogers, Thomas Edison, and athletes like Babe Ruth, Joe Louis and Jack Johnson.
Perhaps the most interesting of these is a picture of Harry Houdini performing a trick in front of thousands of spectators on Broad Street in Newark. Houdini can be seen in the photo bound and hanging from a rafter on a sign made of lights. To the left is his signature.
In the introduction, Mr. Cunningham writes about how he helped preserve Mr. Dorer’s photos after the photographer’s death in January of 1962. Mr. Dorer’s widow was distraught and wanted her husband’s files removed as quickly as possible, perhaps even thrown away. Mr. Cunningham raced over and discovered several hundred negatives and prints. He called the director of the Newark Public Library and the collection was saved.
Best of all for a historian, Mr. Dorer’s work was completely indexed, so the subject of the photos, where they were taken and when was all right there. But Mr. Cunningham doesn’t think the photographer did this out of a belief that his work would be exhibited or appear in a book.
"I think his reason for doing it was that he was a meticulous man, and perhaps thought that some day he could use them again somewhere somehow," he says. "I don’t think he had any idea that they would ever be collected."
Mr. Cunningham is a lifelong New Jersey resident but says he didn’t know much about the state until he met Mr. Dorer.
"I had a formal education and not once, except perhaps in fourth grade, did I ever hear New Jersey mentioned as far as geography or history," he says. "The Revolution, for example, in high school, was fought in Boston. I had very little interest in history as a result. I thought it was irrelevant."
All these years later, Mr. Cunningham is sharing his knowledge of the state to others. He’s writing a book about George Washington in Morristown to be titled The Elusive Army. "It sets forth my belief that New Jersey was far and away the most important state in the Revolution," he says.
He’s also written about New Jersey for magazines like National Geographic. Some assignments didn’t work out because of the prejudices people have toward the state. He was once asked to write a story for a national magazine, only to have it rejected because the editor wanted "something that showed how awful the state was."
It’s a perception he finds "disturbing," and one he wants to change. Honoring the work of an old photographer with a Speedy Graphic camera and a fedora is one way to do that.
"(For) the first time I became aware of the diversity of the state, and also the beauty of the state," Mr. Cunningham says of working with Mr. Dorer. The photographer loved things people might not associate with New Jersey, to him an old dirt road in Sussex County or a sand road in the Pine Barrens were things of beauty. "He was constantly preaching the glories of New Jersey."
This Was New Jersey is available at bookstores and online.